Good to Know

“The time is now for all stakeholders — funders, institutions, publishers and researchers — to consider how we can work together to dismantle systemic legacies of exclusion.”

From an editorial in Nature, published 30 May 2022, outlining the journal’s new policy to address the problem of “helicopter research” — when researchers from high-income settings conduct studies with groups in lower-income settings without including members of these groups in the work — and “ethics dumping” — when these same higher-income researchers “export” unethical or unpalatable investigations to lower-income settings where these practices can be conducted. Nature and other scientific publishers were grappling with such challenges this week as part of the World Conference on Research Integrity.

“The inappropriate valuation of the goods and services nature provides us with is a fundamental reason why we have failed to take good care of the ocean and the environment at large. It is undermining humankind’s ability to achieve what I call “infinity fish”: passing on a healthy ocean to our children and grandchildren so they too can have the option to do the same.”

Rashid Sumaila, Director and Professor, Fisheries Economic Research Unit, University of British Colombia, explaining the concept of a sustainable global fishery as “infinity fish”. The concept, which is now the title of his latest book, earned Sumaila a  Partnership Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.